No Age: New EP, Album, Film Score, Documentary in the Works

Randy Randall fills us in on his band's busy schedule

The L.A. dream-punk duo No Age aren't content playing damn near every single D.I.Y. basement venue in the country. Amid near-constant touring, guitarist Randy Randall and drummer/vocalist Dean Spunt are juggling about a million different projects.

At the moment, they're recording an as-yet-untitled new EP, tentatively slated for release on Sub Pop this fall. At the same time, they're also working in the follow-up to last year's great Nouns. This summer, they're heading off on a fascinating-sounding round robin tour with fellow underground luminaries and Pitchfork faves Deerhunter and Dan Deacon. In September, they'll play a H端skerD端 set at ATP New York. In June, they'll perform their live score for the movie The Bear at the Seattle International Film Festival. And Randall's also been working on a music video for MikaMiko's "I Got a Lot" and a huge ongoing feature documentary about all-ages spaces.

That's a whole lot of work for two guys. Somehow, Randall carved out enough time from his ridiculously busy schedule to talk to Pitchfork about everything going on in the No Age universe.

Pitchfork: Is the new EP going to sound different from Nouns?

RR: We're writing songs that are maybe a little bit more left-field than some of the songs that were on the album. The EP will come out before the next record, which will be a good way for us to go through a lot of the sounds that we want to play. It's more sample-based. We're still using guitar and drums, but it's just a way of working around it, working in more of a sort of...not synthetic, but more electronic-sounding thing. I don't know how you can say "electronic" without it sounding like "electronic music". But it'll have loop- and sample-based arrangements.

Pitchfork: Are you working with synthesizers at all?

RR: No, no. No synthesizers. It starts from either vocals or guitars that are heavily affected. Then we kind of take it down the rabbit hole, so to speak, keep affecting it and changing it and re-looping it until you get a wholly new sound.

Pitchfork: So then does this sort of expand on the dreamier parts of Nouns?

RR: Yeah, I think so. It'll be atmospheric, but we're also looking to experiment with making those atmospheric sounds into more cohesive songs as well. So maybe it won't be as sprawling at times. We're trying to lock them up into something that's still as tight as the guitar-driven songs.

Pitchfork: When are we going to hear this?

RR: We're hoping to have it turned in by the first week in June. It probably should be out sometime in September.

Pitchfork: Are you going to be working on a new album after that?

RR: Yeah, we're currently working on the album as well. But we wanted a space for these kind of songs to go that would come out before the record. So we're writing simultaneously for the next record, but we wanted to have a little bit more time to sit with the songs and record them.

Pitchfork: You're also heading out on a round robin tour this summer with Deerhunter and Dan Deacon. Can you explain how the tour's going to work?

RR: Yeah, we just had a long conversation with those guys, and we're looking to make it more of a seamless, single piece of music that all three bands perform in, and not as much of a round robin experience, where it's just one song from each band, one after another. We're looking to really kind of meld together the ideas that currently exist in one band's song, and then augment them, either by having other members play together or adding something new to the song that'll transition to another song. So you'll still hear Deerhunter and Dan Deacon and No Age songs, but they'll be boosted in a way by having other members play in them as well.

Pitchfork: So you might be playing on bits and pieces of Deerhunter songs and Dan Deacon songs?

RR: Yeah, exactly. We're going to meet up in Baltimore before the tour starts and go over the entire piece. We're still just emailing and conference calling, sending out long email threads of ideas.

Pitchfork: Will it be the same piece every night, then?

RR: I think so. We don't want it to be an improvised jam session. With the creative people you have up there onstage, it's going to continue to evolve every night. But it won't be just a big jam party.

Pitchfork: It definitely sounds like a logistical challenge.

RR: Yeah. It's something we've been thinking about, but I think we're going to give ourselves enough time to really get it together and use the musical skills that are at everyone's service. Dan's worked with these larger band pieces before, and he kind of has some more insight into this kind of sectional, symphonic multi-band idea, so I hope he brings something to the table. Pitchfork: You're friends with all those guys, right?

RR: Yeah. We've only played once, I think, all together, in New York two years ago. But we've played with Dan a number of times, and we've played with Deerhunter a number of times, and I'm sure they've played together separately, so this'll be fun. And part of it is just to have kind of a fun touring experience, where you're just out there with your friends, those bands who you really want to see every night. So it's definitely gonna be a good time, for sure.

Pitchfork: Whose idea was the whole affair?

RR: Dan had been bringing it up for about a year, the idea of doing something kind of similar to the Oops! Tour, which was Lightning Bolt and the Locust and Pink and Brown. So it was something that Dan, in passing, had mentioned. And we'd always talked about doing stuff together. I've been talking with Josh from Deerhunter for a while about doing a project. This'll be a fun opportunity to actually put it into action, to find a time in our schedule when it all makes sense and get down to it.

Pitchfork: You've also been working on some remixes lately, for the likes of Bloc Party and Fucked Up. That seems like an interesting challenge for a band like you.

RR: Yeah. I like looking at these songs as pieces of pre-recorded material in similar ways that we work with loops and our own sort of pre-recorded stuff, taking it as individual pieces of sound, found sound or samples or anything. We look at it as recorded objects and then rearrange them in a way that makes sense. That's sort of our aesthetic, or that my aesthetic anyway. I would get these individual elements of the songs in Pro Tools and go in and rewrite or re-arrange the pieces. I wasn't really doing it for a dance sort of goal, it was more just to re-imagine the song as it is. I wasn't really trying to make a dance hit.

Pitchfork: Is that something you want to keep doing?

RR: Yeah, I had so much fun doing those projects. It was such a fun process to get to see how how they had worked on things, really take apart and reverse engineer their songs. It was really insightful and fun to get to do, so yeah, I'd be psyched to do it. No plans for anything right now just because we're working on our own stuff, but in the future I'd like to do more with those projects.Pitchfork: Would you ever want to try re-engineer your own stuff like that?

RR: It's funny; that's kind of what this EP is, in a way. Just in the process of writing it, we'll write the song and then go through a few more edits, different drafts of it, in a similar kind of way. I guess that's how we compare it. It becomes loop-based just by the process of us, in writing, affecting it and trying to push things further. So eventually, it will all start with guitars and vocal ideas, and then end up with just samples and drones. But it's a similar start process.

There are so many great ways to attack writing music today with computer programs like Ableton and Pro Tools and also samplers. But for us, we want to do something we can do live. We want to keep the songs as a performance piece and not just a recording piece. We're more doing the reworking thing as we're writing.

RR: It was amazing. It was one of the biggest honors that I've had as a performing musician, to get to share a stage with somebody Dean and I both consider a hero. Bob has written some amazing songs, and for him to lower himself enough to join us for a song [laughs] was incredible. We played "Miner" to start off, one of the songs from Nouns, and then we did "New Day Rising", one of his songs, and it was really just an incredible honor. I'm smiling from ear to ear.

Pitchfork: It's something I wouldn't have put together, but you guys both took that VFW hall hardcore show aesthetic and pushed it into these more psychedelic, dreamier directions.

RR: Yeah. H端skerD端 are really inspirational in the way they went about their career and just in how prolific they were. We've gotten a chance to talk to Bob, and they were on a constant touring cycle for years. They would write the record in the middle of the tour, record in a Southern California spot, and then finish the tour and go back home and then do the whole cycle again. The record would come out when they got home, and they'd do it again.

Pitchfork: Is that how you guys want to keep doing things? Cranking stuff out like that?

RR: We're not trying to set any kind of record. But one of the funnest things we get to do is to travel and then come home and sit with these ideas and write and get new stuff out there and do it all again. We aren't trying to keep up with any kind of pace. Just our own, what makes sense for us. We start collecting all these ideas, and you're like, "They've got to come out, got to get them out." We're excited to do that.

Pitchfork: And you're playing a H端sker set at ATP New York this fall. How's that going to work? Will you do all H端sker songs?RR: No, we'll probably do some of our songs mixed in with some of their songs. We're still figuring it. We're trying to get Bob out to that show, but we're not sure how everyone's schedules will work out.

Pitchfork: You guys have another project in the works, a live score for a film.

RR: Yeah, Jean-Jacques Annaud's 1989 film The Bear. That will be at the Seattle International Film Festival this June 12, and we're going to do a live score, two shows, one at 7:30 that is all ages and one afterward that is 21 plus. It will be a completely new composition by us that won't really be in the rock vein. It will be more like you were saying, asking about the EP, the kind of dreamy atmospheric sort of portions of some of the No Age songs like "Keechie" and "Impossible Bouquet." The new idea is to layer atmospheric sounds.

Pitchfork: Are you going to use vocals on that at all?

RR: Yes. There will be some kind of vocal part to it; Dean's singing will be there. It is kind of heavily layered again, like doing stuff only just with samples, but accompanied by live drums and live guitar. A lot of it will be written and arranged through sampling. The sound that's in the film already is pretty amazing. There isn't very much talking in the original film, and there are tons of beautiful atmospheric sounds like, you know, the rivers and wind and trees and everything. There is already so much that is going on there. So we are going to be incorporating parts of that as well, the natural sounds that were used in the original film.

Pitchfork: Had that been a favorite movie of yours when you were a kid?

RR: It was definitely a movie that I remember making a large impression on me. There was such a fun element of really feeling like you were out in the wild. There wasn't a lot of talking. You spent about half the movie just watching these animals wander around in nature, and it's easy for a kid to get lost in that kind of world. And the scenes where the small bear cub eats some wild mushrooms and has a psychedelic experience through stop-motion claymation, I remember that leaving a lasting impression on me.

Pitchfork: Did you think about doing this with any other movies?

RR: Yeah. There is a great theater here called Cinefamily that approached us about accompanying a film with music, and the film we first came up with was Milo and Otis. I liked that film a lot as a kid. It's really fun, more comedic and childlike than The Bear. But in doing research on the film, I came across many frightening accusations that may or may not be true but definitely had no way to be proved one way or the other, and it brought up way too many questions about how the animals were treated in the film. It was just something I had to back away from because there were some was pretty horrific accusations. And watching the film, I had to use some logic, like "how did they actually get that kitten safely from the top of the cliff to 80 feet down splashing into the water below?" I assumed they had some sort of stunt double; of course they wouldn't just throw a kitten off a cliff. But upon watching it with that idea in mind, it looked pretty....

Pitchfork: Like they were throwing a kitten off a cliff?

RR: It appeared to be that. I read so many different accusations online. I don't want to say for sure that's what it was, but using my own judgement after reading all the stuff I read, I decided I might as well go ahead and do a score for a different film.

Pitchfork: Do you have any plans to release the score?

RR: No, no plans at this time. Maybe it will turn up in one form or another. Maybe it's an EP or a 12" down the road. But for now, it's just this one performance, and we'll see how it goes from there.

Pitchfork: Are you working on anything else right now?RR: I'm also currently working on a MikaMiko video for "I Got a Lot", one of the tracks off their new record We Be Xuxa. We shot it two weekends ago, before Coachella, and I've just been caught up recording since. I have a friend who is an editor who is helping me edit it, so it should be coming out in a couple of weeks. I'm really excited about that.

Pitchfork: Did you direct the video?

RR: I co-directed it with Lana Kim, from this company the Director's Bureau, which is Roman Coppola's production company. Lana works there, so she and I shot it together with a co-direction credit. [Director] Alisa [Lipsitt] and I have a production company called Stacks and Layers, and we're currently working on an all-ages documentary that has been long in the works. It doesn't really have an exact release day yet.

RR: It's less about the Smell and more the theory of why an all-ages space matters, why are these places important to have here in America. What do they offer versus a more professional venue? Not that these places aren't professional, but it's more about not-for-profit or DIY culture. The Smell being dearest to my heart, but there are so many, many more spaces that are popping up all the time. I just wanted to collect stories from other musicians whose careers or artistic paths were directed by having these spaces.

I'm really excited about it. We're just in a slow part. We have 700 hours of footage of shows and interviews. We interviewed so many great people: Thurston Moore, Ian MacKaye, Calvin Johnson, Kathleen Hanna. And we're still continuing to do interviews for it. A few years ago, we wanted to make a short film, but we got so much footage that we signed on to make it as long and as in-depth as we needed to.

Pitchfork: So many of those places just blank out of existence so quickly, too, and you never hear about them anymore. This sounds really cool.

RR: Yeah. At this time, there are so many. There are a lot of other components I'd like to work on when the film is getting a little closer to being finished, maybe even setting up a website database. There already is the All Ages Movement Project, which Shannon Stewart runs in San Francisco, that's a directory of those places. But I'm thinking about a way to collect an oral history of so many spaces. What has been nice in doing the interviews is that each artist has his own lineage of where he is coming from. You talk over the years, and you hear stories about how these spaces came about. And like you said, then they are gone. But since they were inspiring and continue to inspire artists who go on to inspire so many others, the candle is still there; the seed of those spaces still lives on.

I wouldn't want to make a film that's just a love letter to the one place that I love. There are so many ones that are important and so different in so many different ways; I'd like to open it up to everyone else to tell the story as well. It's one of those quick things where every interview I do opens up ten more interviews. "Oh, you've got to talk to this guy." We've just been following this trail. We have so much footage that we don't quite know what shape it's going to take yet. There are just so many threads and so many great stories.